The Germans in Flanders, 1915–1916

By David Bilton

The book covers the actions of the German Army in the Low Countries during 1915 and 1916. In its broad compass it looks at the battles with the French, Belgians and British, concentrating mostly on the latter. Both 1915 and 1916 were very active years for the Central Powers and the Allies. After a quiet start with minor fighting April 1915 saw gas attacks against Hill 60, followed by 2nd Ypres and intermittent attacks throughout the remainder of the year. There was also considerable naval and air activity through the year. 1916 was arguably the most dramatic year of the War, not least for the Allied Somme offensive.This work, which follows on from the authors German Army in Flanders 1914 in the same series, includes notes on the divisions that fought there and a chronological order of events as they unfolded. Where relevant, material from the German home front is included.Each phase and aspect of the period is detailed from the German point of view using primary and secondary sources from both Germany and Britain. The illustrations provide a pictorial background in both a specific and general form, highlighting life in the front-line as well as rear areas and show how the War affected the towns and villages of the region.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781783038824

David Bilton

David Bilton is a retired teacher who spends his time looking after his family, working as a University lecturer and researching the Great War. He is the prolific author of numerous books about the British Army, the Home Front and the German Army. His first book, The Hull Pals, became the BBC 2 series The Trench. Since he started writing he has contributed to many television and radio programmes. His interest in the Great War was ignited by his grandfather's refusal to talk about his experiences in Gallipoli and on the Western Front.

Book preview

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by

PEN & SWORD MILITARY

an imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

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Barnsley

South Yorkshire

S70 2AS

Copyright © David Bilton 2012

ISBN 978 1 84884 878 8

eISBN: 978 1 78303 882 4

The right of David Bilton to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1 – 1915 The Spring Offensive

Chapter 2 – 1916 The Quietest Year

Day-by-day chronology – 1915

Day-by-day chronology – 1916

Histories of the German divisions that fought in Flanders

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

The book turned into three. Sorry to everyone at home, and thanks.

As with previous books, a great big thank you to Anne Coulson for her help in checking the text and to The Prince Consort’s Library for all their help.

Errors of omission or commission are mine alone.

Not all barracks were permanent. Here a large marquee to is being erected to house returning troops.

Introduction

The purpose of this series of books, The Germans in Flanders 1914, The Germans in Flanders1915-1916 and The Germans in Flanders 1917-1918, is not to analyse, in any depth, the strategic, tactical, political or economic reasons for the fighting in Flanders but rather to chronicle the events that happened there during 1914 – 1918 and how events elsewhere impacted upon these. The brief words rely on the pictures to tell much of the story: pictures from a private collection and from texts published during the period of this history (detailed in the bibliography). The books are not necessarily a chronological photographic record as some periods were more fully recorded than others and in many cases what was photographed in 1915 was just as valid a record as if it had been taken in 1918; in fact, these books are more an attempt to provide a cameo of the experiences of the German Army in Flanders during the Great War. For most of the time, armies do not fight, and the photographs portray life outside the trenches as well as in them.

As with my earlier books on the German Army, I have included a day-to-day chronology to show what was happening across the Belgian Flanders Front from the German point of view. However, as Flanders is a coastal area and the occupied territory closest to the British mainland, the book also deals with events at sea and information about aerial activity.

Most of the book is centred on Ypres and its immediate environs because that is where the actual fighting occurred. However, most of Belgium was occupied; the effect of the war was sometimes felt directly, more often indirectly, throughout the country.

Flanders also provided the German air force with numerous bases, some of which were used to attack England. ‘Quite regularly since 1914, single-engined aeroplanes had braved the Channel, one or two at a time, to drop a few small bombs along the coast. Their favourite target was Dover Harbour. ‘They had become a routine nuisance.

The remains of Zonnebeke church.

Zeppelins were usually employed for bombing, but in late 1916 an aircraft from Flanders bombed London. Lieutenant Ilges (photographer and bomb aimer) and Deck Officer Brandt (pilot), both naval airmen, took off from Mariakerke near the Belgian coast in a single-engine LVG biplane; primarily a reconnaissance aircraft, it had the range to take it to London and could be equipped with bombs. Ilges had photographed the coast on many occasions but had not gone far inland. The flight, unlike the previous coastal trips, was a meandering journey through Essex and up the Thames. During the trip Ilges photographed ‘aerodromes, factories, docks and other choice targets ‘and then, above London, he took more pictures before releasing his load of six twenty-pound bombs. Brandt flew south, managing to evade the British squadrons at Dover and Dunkirk, but engine trouble ended the flight over French lines and the two were taken prisoner. Little notice was taken of the flight or the capture of its crew. The British ‘were too busy exulting over the two Zeppelins’ that had been shot down. However, The Times warned in an editorial that it was likely that there would be further such visits on an extended scale. The following summer ‘German bombers came to London in formation.’

Crown Prince Wilhelm, the Kaiser’s son, with his entourage, watching training manoeuvres in Flanders.

Flanders was an important area for naval offensive operations and had to be guarded against Entente naval attack and the possibility of naval-supported invasion. To this effect the sea-front was guarded by regiments of marine artillery. ‘Thirty guns of the heaviest calibre had been set up there, among them five of 38 cm., four of 30.5 cm., and besides them a large number of quick-firing guns from 10.5 to 21 cm. calibre.’ Manning these fortifications and the coastal trenches employed large numbers of men.

The Naval Corps, the troops defending the naval areas, was instituted under the leadership of Admiral von Schröder on September 3, 1914, and played a part in the taking of Antwerp on October 10, 1914. Naval Corps General Command had its headquarters at Bruges. Its infantry consisted of three regiments of able seamen and the marines. The latter in particular played a part in the great battles in Flanders in 1916 and 1917.

Again, taking the offensive to the Royal Navy required boats, aircraft and of course submarines. In 1916, a quarter of all available U-boats were assigned to the Naval Corps in Flanders. Initially they were small, relatively slow boats but later models were over three times the weight and half as fast again. However, their limited range meant that they could operate from Flanders only against the south and east coasts of England. Most mine-laying submarines also operated from the Flanders coast. Zeebrugge was an important base for the maintenance of these submarine types. ‘When the U-boat campaign opened on February 1, 1917, there were already 57 boats in the North Sea’ of which ‘the Naval Corps in Flanders had at its disposal 31 U-boats of different types.’

A war remembrance card showing the surroundings of Kemmel near Ypres.

While Flanders was a strategically important area, not every day is listed; as on every other front during the war, some days were very active but most were no more or less significant than the previous one. For a missing day the GHQ report simply read: ‘In Flanders today again only artillery activity’ or ‘In the West nothing new’ – in English, the famous words: ‘All quiet on the Western Front’.

The reality underlying the fact of this bland statement is revealed in the letters home of Lothar Dietz, a Philosophy student from Leipzig, who was killed near Ypres on 15 April 1915. ‘You at home can’t have the faintest idea of what it means to us when in the newspaper it simply and blandly says: In Flanders to-day again only artillery activity. Far better to go over the top in the most foolhardy attack, cost what it may, than stick it out all day long under shell-fire, wondering all the time whether the next one will maim one or blow one to bits’.

A charity card sent by a soldier in 1 Landwehr Division, showing one method of moving heavy howitzers through the Flanders mud.

‘Flanders is the ancient name for the mostly flat countryside that stretches from the North Sea coast in Belgium south to the French coast along the English Channel.’ Its name in Flemish means flooded land. In the present day its size is classed as roughly equivalent to Greater Los Angeles. Its average temperature is around nine degrees Celsius and it rains practically every other day. However, the centuries-old drainage system amply coped with the excess of water, creating a fertile land where farmers produced crops of ‘beets, turnips and potatoes as well as flax, cotton, tobacco, grain, and fodder. They kept cattle, sheep, and pigs, chickens, geese, and ducks.’

Flanders is very difficult to define geographically; it has been in a continuous state of flux for hundreds of years. Originally covering a much larger area than today, what was Flanders during the war differed according to the army in which a soldier fought. To the Belgian army it was a defined area that covered the unconquered part of their nation and part of the conquered territory; to the French it was the area of Belgium that they were fighting in; to the British it covered their Front from just north of Arras in France to their furthest left boundary at Boesinghe, north of Ypres. For the German Army, the Flanders Front stretched from Dixmude in the north to Frelinghien in the south, opposite the area held by the French and the British, but, to the General Staff at OHL, Flanders also included the conquered coastal regions of Belgium and their defenders, the Kaiserliche Marine, sea soldiers who guarded the coast and fought in the trenches. As this book is about the German Army, it is their geographical understanding of Flanders (Flandern) that has been used; activity in French Flanders is only mentioned in passing where it relates to the events in Belgium.

The area from the Belgian coast down to Arras witnessed some of the most intense and fierce fighting of the war, fighting equalled only by that at Verdun and on the Somme – battles that occurred during the period covered by this book – a period which was, nevertheless, one of relative quiet for the Flanders Front.

The channel ports were a strategic German objective at the beginning of the war and the Allies needed to keep the ports open for the BEF; Flanders was clearly an area that would be fought over until one side won. A German success would enable their armies to strike at Britain and press southwards in an encircling movement against Paris.

Belgian Flanders lies at or just above sea level. This fact, coupled with the poor drainage caused by continuous shelling, meant that this war was often fought in a sea of mud. The flat ground made any eminence, even one as low as thirty feet, take on a tactical importance for both sides; holding the high ground gave the defender a view of his enemy. Holding ‘a hill of 150 feet was priceless for the observation and artillery control that it